World Inequality Report 2022

• Foreword [Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo]
• Executive Summary
  
  • Reliable inequality data as a global public good
  • Contemporary income and wealth inequalities are very large
  • MENA (Middle East and North Africa) is the most unequal region in the world; Europe has the lowest inequality levels
  • Average national incomes tell us little about inequality
  • Inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability
  • Contemporary global inequalities are close to early-20th-century levels, at the peak of Western imperialism
  • Nations have become richer, but governments have become poor
  • Wealth inequalities have increased at the very top of the distribution
  • Wealth inequalities within countries shrank for most of the 20th century, but the bottom 50% share has always been very low
  • Gender inequalities remain considerable at the global level, and progress within countries is too slow
  • Addressing large inequalities in carbon emissions is essential for tackling climate change
  • Redistributing wealth to invest in the future
• Introduction
• 1. Global Economic Inequality: Insights
  
  • What is the level of global economic inequality today?
  • Global income and wealth inequality between individuals: initial insights
  • Global income and wealth inequality between countries
  • Income inequality varies significantly across regions
  • Differences in inequality are not well explained by geographic or average income differences
  • The geographical repartition of global incomes
  • The limited impact of redistribution on global inequality
  • The complementarity between predistribution and redistribution
  • The extreme concentration of capital
  • Box 1.1. Income and wealth inequality concepts used in this report
  • Box 1.2. The WID.world and Distributional National Accounts Project
  • Box 1.3. The rich ecosystem of global inequality data sets
  • Box 1.4. Impact of the Covid crisis on inequality between countries
  • Box 1.5. Impact of the Covid shock on inequality within countries
  • Box 1.6. What is the relationship between Gross Domestic Product, National Income, and National Wealth?
  • Box 1.7. Comparing incomes, assets and purchasing power across the globe
• 2. Global Inequality from 1820 to Now: The Persistence and Mutation of Extreme Inequality
  
  • Global inequality rose between 1820 and 1910, and stabilized at a high level since then
  • Within-country and between-country inequalities are as great in 2020 as in 1910
  • The global economic elite never fully recovered its Belle Époque opulence
  • The regional decomposition of global inequality: Back to 1820?
  • Taxes and transfers do not reduce global inequality that much
  • Understanding the roots of global economic inequality: Center and periphery imbalances
  • Global inequality within countries is higher than inequality between countries—which remains significant
  • Box 2.1. Global inequality: beyond income measures
• 3. Rich Countries, Poor Governments
  
  • What is wealth and what does owning capital mean?
  • Global private and public wealth: Insights
  • The return of private wealth in rich countries
  • The secular fall of public wealth was exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis
  • The rise of private wealth in emerging countries
  • The decline of public wealth across the world
  • Net foreign wealth has largely increased in East Asia and fallen in North America
  • Financialization increased everywhere since 1980, but at different speeds
  • Economies are increasingly owned by foreigners but some have resisted this trend more than others
  • Box 3.1. How do we measure wealth inequality within countries?
• 4. Global Wealth Inequality: The Rise of Multimillionaires
  
  • Global wealth data remain opaque
  • How large is global wealth and where is it held?
  • The uneven increase in wealth since the 1990s
  • Extreme growth at the very top
  • The evolution of wealth inequality in rich countries
  • Wealth inequality in emerging countries
  • What is driving global wealth inequality?
  • Box 4.1. Who owns what? Breaking down asset ownership by wealth group
  • Box 4.2. How do we measure wealth inequality?
• 5. Half the Sky? The Female Labor Income Share from a Global Perspective
  
  • Female labor income share across the world today: regional divides
  • Evolution of women’s income share across the world
  • Women earn just a third of labor income across the globe
  • The role of pay ratios vs. employment ratios
  • Breaking the glass ceiling: women at the top of the wage distribution
  • Box 5.1. Methodology
  • Box 5.2. Gender inequality metrics
• 6. Global Carbon Inequality
  
  • The need for better monitoring of global ecological inequalities
  • Global carbon inequality: initial insights
  • Emissions embedded in goods and services increase carbon inequalities between regions
  • Global carbon emissions inequality
  • Per capita emissions have risen substantially among the global top 1%
  • Inequalities within countries now represent the bulk of global emissions inequality
  • Addressing the climate challenge in unequal societies
  • Box 6.1. Measuring carbon inequality between individuals
  • Box 6.2. Carbon footprints of the very wealthy
• 7. The Road to Redistributing Wealth
  
  • Why tax wealth?
  • Modernizing personal wealth taxation
  • Estimates for a global progressive wealth tax
  • Regional wealth tax estimates
  • Factoring in behavioral responses to wealth taxation
  • Box 7.1. Learning from past and current examples of progressive wealth taxation
• 8. Taxing Multinationals or Taxing Wealthy Individuals?
  
  • The role of corporate tax in the progressivity of the tax system
  • The decline in corporate taxation since the 1980s
  • The promises and pitfalls of minimum taxation
• 9. Global vs. Unilateral Perspectives on Tax Justice
  
  • Usefulness of unilateral approaches: the case of FATCA
  • Estimates of unilateral vs. multilateral tax deficit collection
  • Anti-tax evasion schemes contain many loopholes and cannot be assessed
  • Properly assessing the road towards tax transparency: publishing basic information
  • Towards a global asset register
  • Box 9.1. Central Security Depositories as building blocks for a global financial register
• 10. Emancipation, Redistribution, and Sustainability
  
  • The rise of the Welfare State in rich countries (1910–1980)
  • The limited rise of tax revenue and public spending in emerging countries since 1980
  • The stagnation of global tax revenue and social expenditure (1980–2020)
  • Lessons from failed trickle-down economics
  • The 1980s–2020s have been marked by a rise of tax evasion, further undermining tax progressivity
  • Using twenty-first-century progressive tax revenue to invest in education, healthcare, and the environment
  • Global redistribution: moving beyond development aid
  • Ending center–periphery imbalances
  • Box 10.1. One-off wealth taxes: a window of opportunity?
  • Box 10.2. Unequal access to healthcare: How the Covid crisis revealed and exacerbated healthcare inequalities between countries
• Glossary
• Country Sheets
  
  • Algeria
  • Argentina
  • Australia
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • Chile
  • China
  • France
  • Germany
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Israel
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Mexico
  • Morocco
  • Nigeria
  • Poland
  • Russia
  • South Africa
  • South Korea
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • Turkey
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Thomas Piketty is Director of Studies at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Professor at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Lucas Chancel is codirector of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and coeditor of the World Inequality Report 2018. A lecturer at Sciences Po, he is also Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.

Emmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Equitable Growth.

Gabriel Zucman is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the EU Tax Observatory.